A family-run business since 1957, U.S. Waterproofing has been servicing customers in Northern Illinois, Northwest Indiana, and Southeast Wisconsin with all of their basement leak and foundation repair needs for nearly sixty years.

With 300,000 dry basements tucked beneath their belt, U.S. Waterproofing continues to excel in customer satisfaction and personalized care, and has even been awarded the coveted Torch Award for marketplace ethics by the Better Business Bureau in 2006.

U.S. Waterproofing prides itself on solid customer relationships and quality workmanship, and boasts that two-thirds of its business comes from positive word-of-mouth as satisfied clients recommend their services to their family, friends, and neighbors.

Why US Waterproofing Turned to Inbound Marketing

In early 2012, Vice President of U.S. Waterproofing, Matthew Stock turned to the Internet to find new ways to attract potential customers to his website.

He noticed that pay-per-click advertising rates were rising, and traditional forms of advertising such as The Yellow Pages were waning in influence with customers.

Stock quickly realized that a solid company website was the future of attracting new clients.

I wanted to stay ahead of our competitors. I saw the future of where things were going, and I wanted to plant the flag first.

Searching online for ways to easily attract visitors to U.S. Waterproofing’s website, Stock stumbled across articles published by HubSpot. Intrigued by HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers, Stock dug in further to see if a marketing platform like HubSpot would be a good fit for U.S. Waterproofing.

While reading reviews about HubSpot, Stock stumbled upon articles written by Marcus Sheridan. After reading a few articles and listening to a few episodes of The Mad Marketing Podcast, Stock began to feel a connection with Sheridan’s River Pools and Spas success story.

“I was interested in Marcus’s story because even though the principles of content marketing apply to pretty much every business,” says Stock, “I found in Marcus a more direct correlation because we were both in the business of generating leads in the home improvement space. I saw U.S. Waterproofing in the same light as River Pools and Spas in that we were educators first, and not just sales people.”

Stock contracted Sheridan to come meet his team at U.S. Waterproofing for a two-day workshop in February of 2012.

Marcus explained inbound in his own way, in which only he can do, and that really got the ball rolling because I needed Marcus to share the vision, I knew that if I was to do it on my own, I could get it done, but nobody would be able to explain it like Marcus, or have the energy to match.

US Waterproofing Integrates Their Sales Team into Their Content Production and Distribution

U.S. Waterproofing’s inbound marketing workshop got the entire company engaged and excited about the prospects of attracting new clients by using Sheridan’s simple methodology of writing pieces of content that answers customers’ questions.

By the end of the workshop, the team at U.S. Waterproofing had amassed their first 50 questions to begin writing articles about.

“Because February was a pretty slow time of year for business, we were fortunate enough that our sales guys really got it,” says Stock “They were more consultation-based salesmen to begin with and they quickly embraced the concepts Marcus taught us.”

Initially, Stock and his sales team headed up the content production effort. However, after a few months, Stock began to realize that having his sales team regularly produce content as well as go out on sales consultation calls was beginning to take a toll on his team.

I quickly found out that as the season got busy and we started picking up more business because of the content we were producing, my sales guys were getting distracted with producing the content. When what I really needed was them out selling and doing consultations.

And while the sales team fully embraced the notion of producing content to attract new visitors, they were having trouble keeping the articles they were writing purely informational.

“I was having a little difficulty with the sales team because not many of them were great writers, and sometimes they wanted to put a promotional slant on their articles,” says Stock, “which I wouldn’t allow, because it goes against what inbound marketing is all about.”

After conferring with Sheridan for a possible solution, Stock realized that a full-time content marketing officer would need to be hired to keep content production rates up, while allowing the sales team to use the articles as a sales tool for educating prospective clients.

“I wanted my sales team to promote the content, use it as part of their sales promotions, and help generate ideas, but I didn’t want to take them away from their primary responsibilities of sales,” says Stock, “I saw them more as the promoters and idea generators of content, and it became difficult over time having them try and meet deadlines for producing content and also selling services.”

Fortunately, Stock found the perfect fit for the company’s content goals when he hired a content marketing officer with a background in public relations, and a strong passion for home improvement education.

“Given that we now had a writer with publicity experience along with a passion for home improvement, we found a guy who could write articles that made sense and also had a caring message behind his articles,” says Stock.

US Waterproofing’s Inbound Marketing Strategy Pays Off

U.S. Waterproofing’s inbound marketing strategy quickly began to take off as visits to the site began to double nearly every month, and within a short span went from a few thousand visitors to the site to nearly 70,000 visitors at peak seasons.

While U.S. Waterproofing isn’t able to help all of their visitors with their basement protection needs as they are a regional service company, traffic to their site from local prospective clients saw a significant increase.

I can’t say that all the traffic benefits the business as we are not a nationwide company, but in Chicago, and the surrounding areas, I’ve seen an increase 10-20 fold in traffic to the website, if not more.

In addition to a surge in website traffic and an ever increasing database of leads, other unexpected benefits began to occur because of the helpful articles U.S. Waterproofing was producing.

“Just by getting traffic outside of Chicago led to getting more links to our site from other authorities in home improvement such as chat rooms, online forums, and do-it-yourself websites as they all started linking to my site,” says Stock, “And while I couldn’t leverage those customers outside of Chicago it still helped to build up the power of my website and make it stronger.”

Local news organizations even began to take notice of Stock’s web presence and often call U.S. Waterproofing whenever they need expert testimonials on the dangers of storms to local residents’ basements.

Today U.S. Waterproofing has amassed over 500 unique blog articles tailored to answering common customer questions and concerns about basement waterproofing and foundation repairs.

And while many companies operating at this level of content production may feel as if their work is complete, U.S. Waterproofing sees it as only the beginning of a new era in customer education and satisfaction.

U.S. Waterproofing is currently in the process of launching a live virtual website application that allows customers to chat with an expert in real time to receive quality information that will help them make the best buying decision possible for their individual situations.

“At this point you have to fill out a form asking when a good time to reach you would be and then we negotiate a time for a consultation,” explains Stock, “but starting very soon we are actually going to book consultations online on a Live Calendar. The purpose behind this is when people call and they already have water standing in their basement it’s pretty nice to be able to give clients instant answers rather than having them wait for someone to call them back.”